Air pollution puts squeeze on Beijing
WITH its parks, palaces, history and culture, Beijing should be one of the more pleasant capitals of the world. Instead, it is considered among the worst to live in because of chronic air pollution.
Lung cancer rates are rising among the 20-million residents of China’s capital, health officials say. For many multinational companies, Beijing is considered a hardship posting and, despite the extra allowances that classification brings, some executives are leaving.
On some days, Beijing is enveloped in a brownish-grey smog, so thick it gets indoors, stings the eyes and darkens the sky in the middle of the day.
Smoke from factories and heating plants, winds blowing in from the Gobi Desert and fumes from millions of vehicles can combine to blanket the city in this pungent shroud for days.
Some foreigners plan their day around the US Embassy’s Twitter feed on Beijing’s air quality, which has hourly posts.
“On a bad day, you’re going to change your plans,” says American Chauvon Venick, who moved to Beijing from Los Angeles with her lawyer husband and young daughter earlier this year.
“You wake up, look outside and it’s a great day, you skip whatever you’re going to do and go outside to enjoy it. If it’s a really bad day, maybe we’ll go and do something inside. I’m not going to have her out and about,” Ms Venick adds, referring to her daughter.
While the embassy’s air quality index has been consistently in the “unhealthy” range around 170 in the past week, the winter months can be especially bad as residents crank up the heating.
One day in early December, Beijing’s smog was so severe it forced the main airport to shut for several hours, and the US embassy’s index reached its ceiling with a reading of 500, which meant the air was hazardous to human health.
Last year, the state-run China Daily quoted a Beijing health official as saying the lung cancer rate in the city had increased by 60% during the past decade, even though the smoking rate during the period had not seen an apparent rise.
The Economist Intelligence Unit’s liveability index this year ranked Beijing’s pollution at 4,5, with five being the worst.
Out of 70 cities surveyed, the only ones rated worse were Mumbai, New Delhi, Karachi, Dakar, Dhaka and Cairo.
Beijing has a lot going for it, aside from being the capital of the world’s second-largest economy and home to World Heritage sites like the Summer Palace and world-famous cuisine.
But the pollution has reached such levels that it can be hard convincing foreign executives to move to the city.
“We can’t get people to move here. Pollution is a big worry, especially if you have children,” says a Beijing-based executive for a large western financial services firm. “Beijing is considered a hardship posting nobody wants.”
Those taking advantage include companies that make air purifiers, which report booming business and count big foreign firms among their clients.
“Sales last year were three times the average of what we had seen in previous years,” says Zheng Hui, a sales consultant for Swiss company IQ Air.
Chinese authorities made an all-out effort to improve air quality during the 2008 Summer Olympics, curtailing vehicle movements and relocating outdated, polluting factories. The relief was temporary, as curbs on factories were relaxed and car sales continued to rocket.
It is still a sensitive issue, especially as Beijing tries to position itself as a global business hub. Last month, a senior Chinese official demanded that foreign embassies stop issuing air pollution readings, saying it was against the law and diplomatic conventions, in pointed criticism of the US embassy index.
The Beijing authorities say they are well aware of the air pollution problem.
“We are trying to improve air quality. It is not only to attract investment from abroad; we are also doing it for the health of all Beijingers,” says an official at Beijing’s environmental protection bureau.
Elsewhere in China, there have been protests in recent weeks over threats to the environment.
On Saturday, officials cancelled an industrial waste pipeline project after antipollution demonstrators occupied a government office in eastern China, destroying computers and overturning cars.
Earlier this month, thousands took to the streets in Sichuan province’s Shifang town to protest against a $1,6bn copper refinery they feared would poison their families. The city government swiftly called off the project.
For expatriates in Beijing, especially from the West, air pollution is not the only challenge. English is not widely spoken, public transport is often crowded, food safety is a worry and tight controls on the internet mean social media websites such as Facebook and Twitter are difficult to access. Reuters